by Asta Bowen
Contents
Pronunciation Note
Part One
One The Noise That Changed Everything
Two Oldtooth’s Arithmetic
Three A Baby’s Cry
Four Last in Line
Five Marta Hunts Alone
Six A Pack to Call Home
Seven Monkey See, Monkey Do
Eight Rendezvous
Nine Growing Pains
Ten Oldtooth’s Find
Eleven First Warning
Twelve Meadow Days
Thirteen Kidnapped
Fourteen Trap Smart
Fifteen Reunited
Part Two
Sixteen The Bad Dream
Seventeen To Run
Eighteen Lost
Nineteen Trespassing
Twenty Abandoned
Twenty-One Hungry for Home
Twenty-Two Not Quite Alone
Twenty-Three Starburst
Twenty-Four Hungry Horse
Twenty-Five Black Wolf, Black Water
Twenty-Six Salmon Fishing
Twenty-Seven First Snow
Twenty-Eight Not Home
Twenty-Nine Beaver Woman Lake
Thirty A Few Golden Days
Thirty-One Marta’s Dream
Part Three
Thirty-Two Counting Coup
Thirty-Three Gray Wolf
Thirty-Four Hunting the Hunted
Thirty-Five Lindbergh Lake
Thirty-Six Solitude
Thirty-Seven Greatfoot
Thirty-Eight Running Together
Thirty-Nine Rock Creek
Fourty Wolf Love
Fourty-One Evaro Crossing
Fourty-Two Den Hunting
Fourty-Three Discovery
Fourty-Four In the Ninemile
PART FOUR
Fourty-Five Another Noise
Fourty-Six No Sign
Fourty-Seven Greatfoot Hunts
Fourty-Eight The Way of the Wolf
Fourty-Nine The Gift
Fifty The Man
Epilogue
Author’s Statement
To Marta
Pronunciation Note
Here are the local pronunciations of some words in this story. Vowel sounds are short unless otherwise specified.
Camas
CAM us
Chinook
shi NOOK
Evaro
EV a roh
Kootenai
KOOT nee
Ovando
o VAN doh
Tenino
ten NINE oh
Part One
One
The Noise that changed Everything
Marta was deep in the den nursing her pups when she heard it. One sharp crack, like a lone thunderbolt, pierced the clay roof and stung her ears. Oldtooth, asleep just outside the den, twitched and jerked awake, his worn face groggy for an instant, then alert.
Marta had heard this sound before, and it did not mean a storm. It meant trouble. She stood up in the darkness, and the newborns tumbled away from her. She crept to the mouth of the den and listened, her black fur glinting in the starlight that filtered through the trees. All was quiet. She sniffed.
With her great wolf nose, Marta sniffed again. She smelled the spring rain that had fallen the day before, and she smelled dogtooth violets in the meadow. She smelled thawing soil and budding trees, and she smelled several fat mice within a quick pounce from the den—but for once, the mice didn’t tempt her.
She smelled the scent left by Calef, her mate, and it told her how long he had been gone on the evening hunt. She smelled a dull, oily haze from the road nearby, and she smelled the remains of a recent meal, a snowshoe hare Oldtooth had gotten all by himself. Then she smelled it: clear as a stroke of lightning in the stillness, the sting of gunpowder hit her nose, and every muscle froze.
Marta’s head filled with the smell, and her heart began to pound. She looked at Oldtooth, who had not gotten up but was still peering in the direction of the sound. If the smell had reached him, he gave no sign.
Oldtooth did not move, and all was quiet again. The stinging smell drifted past, and the new leaves around the den stirred in the night air. Nothing but the mice moved on the ground. Marta’s heart finally steadied, and the blood stopped pounding in her ears. Hearing the babies mewling in the blackness, she turned inside and crawled back to them. At the inner chamber she stood again for a moment, listening; then she nuzzled all three pups close together, dropped her rear end, folded her legs, and lay down to wait for Calef.
This was their first year on the Montana frontier, and their first year together. The birth a few days before was also their first. Marta had traveled far from the north to find this valley, to find Calef, to find her place in the world. It hadn’t been easy.
It had not been easy in the north, either. Born last in her litter and never quite accepted by the pack, her first years were a struggle for food, for protection, and for learning the way of the wolf. The way of the wolf was ancient and wild, a code of survival more than a million years old. Taught by example from one generation to the next, it was a code of the pack that found strength in numbers; a code of hunting that killed without waste; a code of order in which every animal had its place.
In those days, Marta’s place was on the fringes of the pack, and she had had to learn the way of the wolf from a distance. Being an outcast made her strong and taught her to survive on her own. Marta was, above all, a survivor.
Now for the first time she had a real pack, with Calef and Oldtooth and the little ones. She had a pack and a place in the world: a home.
Home. For Marta, as for any wild creature, habitat was everything, and Pleasant Valley was a good habitat for a wolf. Broad and sweeping, with miles of meadow surrounded by a sea of trees, the valley lay on the gentler side of the Rocky Mountains. Foothills and forests stretched for days in almost every direction, and toward the morning sun lay the backbone of the continent, guarded north and south by vast reaches of wilderness.
No wolves had settled in this valley for a long time. A thousand years ago, Marta’s and Calef’s ancestors had ranged across the continent, hunting and singing from one valley to the next. But those were the days when humans were few on the land and lived much as wolves did. Now the land was covered with a new kind of human, a loud and busy tribe that changed everything. They filled the prairies with buildings and roads. They drove the animals into the forest and cut down the forests. They turned rivers to lakes and lakes to rivers. They carved wide paths through the mountains and dug huge holes in the earth. They outshone the stars with their lights. And they killed.
They killed deer and bear and elk and buffalo. They killed moose and grouse and beaver. They killed salmon. They killed eagle. And they killed wolf.
In the old days, both wolves and humans killed in order to live, and both survived. But when the new humans came they killed in new ways, and much was wasted. Many wolves died and many more were driven out, and the last wolf homeland was pushed far to the north.
Since the new humans came, the forest wasn’t safe. The earth itself sometimes grew teeth: sharp, strong ones. A wolf could be sniffing the mark of an intruder, trying to protect the pack’s territory, and the ground could reach up and snap around its toes, and hold tighter and tighter until it never let go. Oldtooth knew about the metal bite. It had almost killed him once. Marta knew, too; she had watched from a distance as a packmate howled and thrashed to exhaustion, only to be carried away by a man. Humans made many dangers for wolves, especially young loners without the protection of the pack and the wisdom of their elders. Young loners like she had been.
Marta avoided humans. She learned to dodge their traps and cars and guns, and especially to dodge their scent. In Pleasant Valley the peopl
e were few and kept to their homes and ranches at the far end of the meadow. But wherever they went, they left their mark. Wherever they went, they brought loud noises and stinging smells like the one still lingering in Marta’s nose and mind.
That night, Calef was slow to return. As the leaves whispered outside and the stars wheeled overhead, Marta waited. Perhaps he was taking extra time to get the best kill; the babies, it seemed, changed everything. He had never been gone this long before.
In the darkness of the den, she and the little ones were safe. She felt three soft, round noses and paws searching the skin of her belly where it was stretched full of milk. Marta could not see them in the darkness, but she did not have to. Knowing each pup by its smell, she felt the gray female, then the black male, and finally the little black female find a nipple and begin to pull. Marta curled around them, making a warm circle in the dark, and listened as they nursed themselves to sleep.
When light finally came and the first birds rustled awake, Calef still had not returned. Marta left the pups sleeping with Oldtooth at the door of the den and set out to find her mate. She dropped her head and let the scent of his tracks fill her nose, drawing a map of the path he had taken.
Trotting up the hill behind the den, she noticed one of Calef’s long guard hairs caught on the bare branch of a shrub. At the top of the ridge she stepped over a fresh dung pile of his, squatted to mark it, and continued down the tunnel of his scent. His tracks dropped gradually over the other side, crossing and recrossing game trails and creek beds still filled with snow. Soon the trail led toward a human place, where the trees had been cut down and replaced with buildings and roads and animals behind fences: not wolf, not elk, not deer, not bear. Something small and white and woolly and slow.
As Marta drew near she trotted more softly, pausing now and then to lift her head and listen. All was quiet except for the sleepy bleating of the sheep and their young. She was almost to the fence line when she stopped dead. The smell of blood filled her head. Ten feet away she saw the awful truth: grasses battered flat by hard, human footprints and soaked with patches of thickening blood. Calef’s blood.
Marta’s senses exploded. Calef was hurt! Where was he? She circled the beaten grasses, first left, then right, then left again, but found no more tracks. She circled, stopped, and sniffed the air: nothing. Circled back and stopped. Impossible. The trail ended here, in this troubled patch of meadow grass. Marta’s head felt huge and thick, a dead weight on her neck. A trace of the gun smell that had come in the night hovered over the grass, and her great nose sagged.
No Calef. Just his scent, still fresh, long flecks of his gray fur, and too much blood. No sign of the brushy tail that waved high when they played. No clever eyes, no soft ears, no strong muzzle that could crush the haunch of a deer in one motion.
Marta’s throat closed. The sound, the smell, the blood all fit together now and meant one thing. Calef. Gone.
She stood for a long moment in the morning light, poised at the spot where her mate’s trail ended. Then she huffed, a great snort that seemed to come from her heart instead of her lungs, turned, and ran low and fast all the way back to the den.
Two
Oldtooth’s Arithmetic
Oldtooth had planted himself firmly in front of the den when Marta left to look for Calef and was still on alert when he heard her coming back through the trees. His teeth were old but his nose was wise, and the stinging smell that came in the night had troubled both his sleep and his waking. It was the smell of death, and when he saw Marta returning alone, tail low and eyes dim, he knew. Calef was gone.
Calef was gone, and Oldtooth’s ears sagged. Wolves have their own arithmetic, and they know it by heart. Oldtooth had lived through seven winters so far, three of them as the alpha male leading his own pack. In those three years, he and his mate birthed litters of two, then ten, then six, and raised them with the help of other adults in the pack. As the young grew, they either joined the group as hunters or went off on their own. Of eighteen births, only seven lived long enough to stay or go. Though bad weather and disease took a few and a mountain lion got another, the greatest threat was starvation.
A well-fed wolf could usually escape from danger and disease; a hungry wolf lived next to death. Oldtooth had been a youngster once, and a hungry one. Born in a summer of drought, he was weaned at a dry nipple and learned to fight for scraps of meat and bone. Most of his littermates starved.
Later, when he and his mate had their own pack, they had to know when to hunt and when to rest, where to travel and what dangers to avoid. Only they would breed and bear the pack’s young, and when strange wolves approached, they decided who was welcome and who was not.
As the alpha, Oldtooth learned the signs that would spell life or death for his pack. He could read the numbers of deer in the layers of winter snow and the size of buds in spring. In good seasons and bad, he knew how much meat three big healthy wolves could get and how much three small hungry ones could eat. In this pack he was not the leader, and he was no longer strong. Calef was the alpha male, and he was dead. That left Marta, the alpha female, and Oldtooth: one and a half healthy adults to feed themselves and three hungry youngsters.
The old wolf’s eyes softened. He looked toward the den, toward Marta and the pups, and it added up to one thing. He looked toward the forest, toward the many deer it would take to feed them, and it added up to another. Finally he looked at his own ragged paws and felt a hollow stab in his belly: it was the old drought, echoing down the years.
But there was no drought now. In fact, Oldtooth’s belly was nicely rounded. He and Calef and Marta had eaten well all winter, having had a fine meal just a few days ago in a yearling doe they had hunted together. With the meat from his latest hare, Oldtooth still felt a certain fullness between his ribs.
That fullness would not last. The hunger would start in his stomach and travel outward. In a few days it would seep through his bones, into his muscles and under his skin, and spread up the ridge to his tail, making it twitch. Next it would shoot down to his paws, bringing him to his feet, then crawl up his throat like a howl and end in his mouth, sending a sharp command to his teeth.
His teeth. What Oldtooth lacked, and what his instinct and experience could not replace, was the most basic hunting tool: sharp, strong teeth. When still the alpha of his old pack, he was caught in a metal trap, a small trap meant for coyotes. Rather than break off his leg, he chewed through the steel. It took a long time, but more importantly, it took his teeth. Now Oldtooth’s front teeth were worn in half, and others were ground to the bone; where Marta had fangs that could pierce through wood, he had rounded nubs that didn’t even touch.
He still had enough teeth to eat small amounts of meat, but not enough to take down a deer or elk on the run. Smaller animals he could kill with pressure from his jaws, and in desperate times, he had taken some small steers. It wasn’t his first choice of food, and in Pleasant Valley he had never touched the range cattle, but these were good times—or had been, until now.
Without Calef, there would be no more hunts like the one a few days ago. It was one of those calm spring days when the snow crystals grow fat and glossy, sparkling from the tips of tree branches. The pups were not born yet, and Marta’s sides swelled with their weight. She had just finished digging the den, and all three wolves were napping in the late afternoon sun when Calef signaled the time to hunt. He woke Marta first. Standing in front of her, he wore the hunting face and whined the hunting whine.
Marta was on her feet in an instant, belly low, and swung her tail from side to side as they locked eyes. She was hungry, too. She licked and nipped at Calef’s muzzle, the traditional wolf kiss, and he licked and nipped back until the kiss turned playful, a mock tussle with much growling and clashing of teeth. Suddenly Calef opened his jaws, tipped back his massive head, and began to howl. When Marta joined in, their singing woke Oldtooth and brought him to his feet. He added a third voice to the chorus, and nose to nose they sang
their food-finding song. One by one their voices trailed away, and they stood wagging tails as the notes threaded off into the trees. This was the way of the wolf.
Oldtooth, who had the most experience in choosing prey, pointed the way; his pace was slow, but his instinct was sure. He led downhill from the den site, pausing at the road that circled the valley. Few cars came this way, but when they did, the wolves had to hide and wait for them to pass. That day the road lay damp and undisturbed in the sun. Nothing more than a badger had been by, though the clay was plotted with droppings from the cattle that shared the valley floor.
Marta’s nose wrinkled at the smell. Unlike deer pellets, cow piles were sloppy, stinking messes. Even as an outcast, Marta had learned which animals were food and which were not. Deer were always food; elk and moose were food if a pack could catch them. Smaller animals like rabbit and beaver were easy prey for a lone wolf. Bears were not food, and neither were lions. Birds and fish were sometimes food, but usually not.
Cows, which arrived shortly after the new kind of humans, didn’t fit in. They walked on four legs and chewed cud like deer, but their hides were thick and their bones were immense. They didn’t smell or act like anything else in the forest, and they made hideous noises for no reason at all. Like other things connected with people, Marta avoided them.
Following Oldtooth’s nose, the wolves crossed the road. With one eye toward food and the other toward danger, they ran single file along the meadow’s edge until they were across from the lake. Then they darted across the grass to a stand of tall aspen trees at the water’s edge.
From the shelter of the aspens, they could survey much of the valley with its wooded hills on either side. The landscape was still in winter drab, but sunlight caught on the first sprigs of green. Deer tracks crisscrossed the meadow, radiating from the lake into the surrounding forest. Oldtooth had a second sense about deer tracks; from pellets alone, he could tell which animals were old or ill. From hoofprints, he could tell which were lame. Keeping near the fringe of the aspens, he sniffed delicately at one trail and then another. Marta and Calef followed, checking the signs Oldtooth checked and ignoring the ones he ignored.